Traditionally in this part of China, the cremated remains of loved ones were placed into urns, which were in turn interred in the family tomb at the local graveyard. But the graveyards here are becoming too full, and there isn’t enough usable land available to expand them or start new one.

This is a problem reported in many parts of China; I recall reading an article a couple years ago that Shanghai was encouraging its residents to accept “burial at sea,” with cremated remains being dumped into the sea from a dock somewhere in Shanghai. (I’m not sure if this was ever readily adopted.)

Here at Anhai, however, the response was to build a large mausoleum about six years ago for housing the remains.

I understand that I was the first “foreigner” (read: non-Chinese) to visit this mausoleum, but keep in mind that my going there was personal, for my Wife and me and our children to visit my Father-In-Law’s final resting place for the first time. You’ll understand therefore why I keep my descriptions here generic and leave out most of the personal angle to this narrative.

To get to the mausoleum, you have to travel out the northeast side of town–this would probably be called “the other side of the tracks” in some places. It’s an area full of small industrial and metal works, with mostly “Northerners” toiling in them. Some operations there looked like they were solely in the business of collecting huge heaps of rusty scrap metal and machinery. Piles of rubble were everywhere. Passing one small workyard, I saw a poorly dressed fellow in his 20′s squatting down using a blowtorch to cut circles out of a large sheet of metal. He wasn’t wearing protective goggles or gloves, and his shoes were essentially “flip-flops.”

But after passing through this area, there’s a short stretch of semi-rural land (fewer buildings and a few cows running around, at least) before you curve around a former gravel pit that now is a duck farm and park beside the mausoleum.

Chun Jie, the day set aside to visit family tombs, falls in early April this year, and the dead typically aren’t visited during Spring Festival, so we were the only visitors this day. (It’s a packed pandemonium on Chun Jie, however, we’re told, which has prompted some who can afford to do so to buy private small plots of land for creating new family tombs. Instead of all of one’s family’s remains being at a single location, they’re on various floors and in various rooms throughout the building, and you have to visit them all.)

We checked in with the gatekeeper–the man with the key–at the front office to confirm that we had a relative interred here. He scoured through a loosely bound stack of pages, all handwritten, to confirm that the name and location we gave him matched up.

There is no artificial lighting in the building, except for a couple lights in the gatekeeper’s office (I could see that he sleeps in a room just off his office–can’t say that I really envy his assignment). The ground floor especially is very dark, but on this ground floor, there is a large altar for burning incense–a wall hanging with the character meaning approximately “to memorialize” hangs above it.

On the upper floors, there are series of open-face rooms, accessed by external corridors, containing the interred remains. (There are spaces for remains on the ground floor too, but the place seems to be filling from the top down.)

In each room, there are rows of what struck me first as “display” cases, with about an 18″ inch by 18″ inch “locker” for each set of remains. These cases are nine or sometimes ten rows high, and completely line the walls of each of these rooms, which are about 10′ feet wide by 20′feet long, meaning that each room contains the remains of 200-300 people, by my quick estimation.

The “display” cases are rather crude; the shelves are made of metal, painted dark green, and each “locker” has a glass front with a metal frame that has been screwed into place.

The “lockers” are made available on a first-come, first-served basis, but not all cost the same. Spaces on the upper floors cost more than those on the lower floors. In any given room, spaces on the bottom rows of the display cases cost the least, while those higher up cost more–with the exception of those at about eye-level being the most coveted.

Many on the bottom row of the display cases, I figured, were nearly pauper’s graves. Behind the glass front, you see only an urn that has been wrapped in the red cloth with yellow characters coming from the crematory, and maybe a hand-scribbled paper with the name of the deceased on it.

At the “upper end,” people have small “gravestones” created and placed in front of the urns, with a picture of the deceased etched into this dark stone, and writing telling the person’s name and the dates of their birth and death carved sometimes quite exquisitely onto them. The etched pictures are quite good, looking sort of like a stone-carved version of the pictures of people done with pointillistic style on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Most of these cases also have a picture of the deceased. Sometimes it’s the same picture used as the source for the stone etching. Sometimes it’s simply the person’s “hu kou,” or government-issued identity card. And in some cases, liberties are taken to “dress up” the stone-etched version. I caught a glance of one picture of a man perhaps in his mid-30′s with slightly unkempt hair, a plain shirt, and a moustache in need of some trim work. The stone etching made from this photo, however, had given him a haircut, placed him in a nice suit, and cleaned up the moustache a great deal.

One or two photos I saw looked to have been of elderly people taken posthumously.

Most pictures were of older people, but of course not only the elderly die. A picture of a young woman, perhaps 20 years old, looked like a university student photo. And though I wasn’t browsing the stacks at great leisure, I caught glimpses of several children’s pictures too. In one, a little girl around ten years old was wearing a little “graduation” cap and gown, and a beautiful smile, holding a little “diploma” in one hand and a big new stuffed dog in the other. Seeing that one, as a parent, my heart ached.

The display case spaces are small; there’s not much room to place much else into them beside the urns and maybe the small gravestone, but the typical sorts of things that did go into them include things like a pack of cigarettes, small bottles of a favorite beverage, tea cups or small teapots, Afterlife Money, a favorite pair of glasses, a small plastic flower arrangement or–in the children’s cases I did see–a small toy or doll.

Incense is burned here quite a bit, you can imagine, and so everything, even items inside the display cases, are covered with a thin layer of dust.

Although the green metal “locker” shelves give the mausoleum a nearly industrial feel at first glance, and the construction of the building is for the most part typical government drab, it is what it is: final resting place for people who were loved and are missed, including my Wife’s Father.

This is why I took only a couple pictures of the outside of the building, and not any of the small dusty glass and metal tombs.

Here they are, nonetheless:

Here is some biographic information about my Wife’s siblings, presented here primarily to offer more insights into what’s going on in China via snippets of their lives.

**My Wife’s Younger Brother**

Besides being hounded by everyone to hurry up and get married, my 29-year-old Brother-in-Law works in nearby Qingyang in a Provincial Typhoon Monitoring and Response Agency. In particular, if typhoons are headed toward Fujian Province or have struck, part of his job is to direct which resources (mostly military) are directed to which areas. I’m not clear on the particulars of how he does this, though he says his job is really just “to sit in front of a computer” waiting for something to happen.

He does have great IT skills, though, and so has become mostly responsible for his office’s Local Area Network setup as well.

Typhoons do strike around here, but only during a small part of the year.

This means he has some extra time on his hands at work, which he has used to start a small business selling clothing–we’ll call it factory overruns–on taobao.com, an eBay-like site where anyone in China with something to sell in small quantities seems to be heading.

The other interesting aspect of his job: employees gain access to and exit their work facility through fingerprint recognition. Gattica-like, they have to place their hand on a monitor which opens the door for them, but–more importantly, he confides–to monitor whether anyone is late to work or takes off before quitting time.

**My Wife’s Younger Sister**

My Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband work for the Chinese Postal Service by day, but, being the gung-ho entrepreneurs that they are, also operate a small business on the side selling cellular phones and phone cards, which they do pretty well with. They originally started off running a private Internet cafe when broadband access came to Jinjiang a few years ago, with my Wife’s Younger Brother using his computer and IT skills to get it running, but when the government tightened the restrictions on running these, they decided to leave that business.

They currently live with his parents in an apartment in Qingyang, but in a couple years will be moving into a “villa” on the grounds of a large development complex going up in Qingyang.

It seems that her husband’s father invested in some land some years back for 200,000 RMB. Last year, the government came along and let him know that (1) his land was part of a larger plot that had been approved for this complex to go up, and (2) that he would be paid 800,000 RMB for it, “whether he liked it or not.” (This was, of course, actually a tremendous appreciation.)

They in turn decided to put this money back into property in the same complex, along with some other funds they’d all four saved, and so they’ll live in a large four-story “villa” in this modern complex _and_ own a storefront in a prime spot in the complex’s shopping district.

His parents hope that they can all leave their government jobs then, primarily so that as private business people, my Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband can have another child. A son. Or two.

**My Wife’s Elder Sister**

My Wife’s Elder Sister, as I’ve mentioned before here, recently divorced. The fellow she was married to, my Mother-In-Law objected to him in the first place for reasons I’ll not get into, but the folks said that ultimately the choice was hers (the Elder Sister’s).

This fellow had a small factory that produced “parts” on contract for a shoe manufacturer, but as the shoe manufacturing processes matured, it became less and less necessary for the large factories to outsource these small parts, and his contracts dried up.

He worked hard for awhile trying to find a new niche, but grew frustrated, and eventually was spending all his time at bars and massage parlors. Finally, Elder Sister had enough and showed him the door.

And it was her door to show him, as she has a solid government job as a statistician at the local hospital, and the apartment was hers–purchased with a “government employee discount” when the building went up.

Her apartment is on the other side of town from the family home, and some relatives have begun suggesting to her that she move back to the family home, since my Mother-In-Law is now widowed, one daughter has moved to Qingyang and the other to Seattle, and the Younger Brother often stays in Qingyang for a few days at a time in a government dorm rather than commute back and forth every day, leaving Mother-In-Law here sometimes alone in a 3.5 story house. Plus, when he’s not in school, Elder Sister’s seven-year-old son stays here with my Mother-In-Law while she works, sometimes overnight.

She’s reticent to move back, though I can see pro’s and con’s on both sides of the issue. On the one side, family members might feel less lonely if they lived under the same roof instead of different homes across town. On the other hand, moving back home (though she would keep ownership of her apartment) might feel _too_ much like a step backward, and she’s always had a fierce independent streak.

Independent divorced working professional mothers.

I daresay this is the first generation in China that has seen much of this as a cultural phenomenon.

L to R, My Wife’s Elder Sister, My Wife, My Wife’s Younger Sister, My Wife’s Younger Brother

Engrish.com long ago popularized instances of English that’s just “not quite right,” mostly from Japan, where non-native speakers of English have mangled translations into non-comprehensability or unintentional humor. (HanziSmatter.com does something similar in reverse with bad Chinese Character tattoo renderings in the West.)

These aren’t by any stretch among the best finds in this category, but here are a few English language snafus I’ve spotted here lately.

Wheat City: Happly Birtherday to You!

My Wife’s Younger Sister’s Husband had a birthday recently, and his party somehow ended up with two large cakes; they sent one of them over to our home, and I found the package to be photo-worthy. The company making the cake is called “Wheat City,” and they took the liberty of expanding “Happy Birthday to You!” into “Happly Birtherday to You!”

It’s the thought that counts, I guess.

Another one. A paper manufacturing company here has launched a line of products called “Mind Act Upon Mind.” Kind of a weird moniker on a roll of toilet paper, where I would think it’s more “Paper Act Upon…”, oh, well, nevermind.

A few days ago during one of the factory visits I’m making here, I passed a sign with Chinese on it that should have been translated as “Employees Only Beyond This Point,” but instead was rendered “No Staff, No Admittance.”

After that I kept thinking of things like, “No blood, no foul”; “No Pain, No Gain”; “No Woman, No Cry”; and “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.”

And the doozy.

The tea set given to me by the multi-millionaire I mentioned in an earlier post came complete with a product description on the inside of the box lid.

It reads–and I’ve take care to reproduce spelling, punctuation and word spacing exactly:

Jade Grease porcelain is named by yt’s jade and rouge nutural,it was created by Mr.minglong Den who is one of Fujian folk artist.Jade and Grease procelain is made of fine mineral around Dehua which is conbine four kinds of best kaoline, expecially feldspar mineral. Afer long terms examination,it got the new technic fill a preseription , inheritting the Dehua tranditional artwork of white porcelain, even used exquisite hand-crafts which is popular in the world with amass worthiness, It becoming one kind of newly well-know Dehua porcerlain in home and abroad. It showing crystal and lucency, rich and plentiful, pure and clean, thinner and sounder. It creditably the porcelain masterwork.

China white (Dehua white porcelain) ,it’s name “white porcelain”,not only white and lucency,but also soft and thin ,expecially showing white with a little yellow.So Jade and Grease porcelain is famous in the world owing to it’s easily distortion. Expecial the cup bowl of tea set, It focused the merit of hand scaldpess,rolling tea,keeping thot and so on .If any pollute,Please use toothpaste or bleacher.

Remarks:This is top grade porcelain,Please clean the cup and cover separately in ovder to avoid breakage.